Do you ever feel like there are not enough hours in the day? From sourcing candidates to scheduling interviews, days can fly by without making any notable progress on our to-do lists. Then, we leave work concerned our growing mountain of work or worse spend hours each night desperately trying to catch up.
If this sounds familiar, don’t worry. You’re not alone. However, the solution is rarely to work more (unless of course you enjoy spending extra hours at the office). So, how do you do it?
Look for recurring tasks in your process that can automated.
But which tasks should I automate? This is a great question, and one you should must ask yourself before you dedicate any time to automating your workflow. Once you have identified a task, here is what you have to ask yourself.
If the task reoccurs at more than once a week, takes longer than 15 minutes to complete, rarely varies, and doesn’t require a ton of oversight, it’s a perfect candidate for automation.
If you’re still not sure where to start, check out these suggestions for quick wins to save you time.
Scheduling
How many emails does it take to schedule a meeting? The answer is one. Any more than that and you are not being respectful of your time. Stop playing inbox tag, and instead spend less than 10 minutes registering for a free scheduling tool. You’ll get your own unique link that you can send to candidates and clients where they can easily reserve time on your calendar.
Ready to take the headache of scheduling? Check out my previous post 3 Tools to Simplify Scheduling.
Application Acknowledgements
Even if you’re not currently sending application acknowledgements, it’s so simple to automate that there is no excuse not to do it.
If you’re lucky, your current ATS will offer email automation or integrate with a robust email marketing platform, like MailChimp. (P.S. Loxo offers recruitment marketing features, and it’s a customer favorite for a reason.)
Simply set up an email drip using a predefined template, associate it with a list of candidates in your ATS / CRM, and set the email to send whenever new contacts are added to the list.
Since you are only thanking the candidate for the application, you rarely have to monitor the automation once it’s properly set up and tested.
Sync Your Email to Your ATS / CRM
Most ATS / CRMs (including Loxo) will allow you to easily sync your inbox to their platform either through a direct integration or a Chrome extension. If you’re not taking advantage of this time-saving feature, then you’re either spending hours each day manually updating your system of record or you have incomplete, outdated contact records.
If you haven’t already, do yourself a favor, and sync your email right now. Seriously, I mean it. Out of all the things on this list, this is by far and away the best thing you can do for future you and whoever else might be working with.
Email Templates
While not an automation in the traditional sense, email templates are a must-have for any savvy recruiter. Heck, they are a requirement for anybody who works out of their inbox.
While you may not send the same exact email each time, the majority of your emails probably repeat the same things over and over again. So, why should you type out the same message each time?
Instead, draft templates or, better yet, copy existing emails from your sent folder and save them as templates in your email provider or recruitment platform. Sending emails will be so much less painful, and you’ll be able to clear out your inbox in record time.
Schedule Your Social Ahead of Time
Whether or not you are responsible for your agency’s social media accounts, you’re probably still active on your own profiles. Take a hint from marketer’s and use a free tool, like Hootsuite, to schedule your updates in advance across all of your profiles at once.
This 15+ minute task each day can be done once a week (or even less) in the same amount of time. Best of all, you can monitor your streams right from the tool and avoid spending precious time scrolling through irrelevant content and updates.
Never Stop Looking
The truth is the majority of our work could probably be automated after we have done them a handful of times. Avoid getting complacent after you have set up a few automations. The more hours you can free up to focus on value-add tasks, like building an engaging candidate experience, the more effective you will be in the long run.
And, if you’re feeling overwhelmed, don’t try to tackle it all once. Instead, break the process into smaller tasks that you can automate over time.
—
Got an idea for automation, but not sure where to start or how to go about it? Leave a comment below, and I’ll help you get started.